by Derren Brown
* I only now know the meaning of the once-popular playground word (and its true spelling) from having just this moment Googled this odd, tiny fragment of my early years. It has remained until this point a surreal unanswered question from my childhood: what were fain-lights, and why did my father evoke them to curtail our wrestling? I was directed to an online forum and all but leapt from my seat to read that some other London user, searching for the meaning, had routinely heard his father call the same word to stop play-fights when they became too rough.
I only had a few moments to keep Joel and Charlotte focused on the chosen cards in the centre of the table before they would most likely look back to the box (wondering how they could have found their way there) and prematurely spot the other three cards slipped underneath it. So I leant forward, signifying that they should pay attention to my actions, and picked up the three cards from the table. I placed them into the centre of the deck but slid them unseen as one through the deck and a little out the other side so that, as I leant back and relaxed, I was able to remove them unnoticed and retain them in my right hand.
I held the deck high in my left hand, keeping their eyes far from the box to my right, and performed a one-handed shuffle. This is a pretty move, which had taken me many months to perfect. I had, some years before, seen another magician at a stall in Camden Market perform this shuffle and it had immediately lodged in my mind as something I had to learn.
The obsessive trait of latching on to something I see others do and not resting until I have acquired the same skill is a pattern I can trace back to being sat on the stairs in my house as a child of seven or eight with my taller, older cousin Martin. Martin, whom I admired greatly, was able to sit with his feet comfortably on the stair two below the one on which his backside was perched, his knees comfortably positioned at a right angle over the middle stair, which was not touched at all. I thought this impossibly cool and grown up and impressive. My own seven-year-old legs would only let me plant my feet on the step directly below where I was sat, but to be more like Martin I would lean back on my stair and reach down with my toes as far as I could, so that the balls of my feet were just in contact with the step two down from mine. I wanted so badly to be able to sit effortlessly across three steps like my cousin. When I had grown enough to do so, I remembered being delighted with my success, and I still sometimes proudly note my ability to casually traverse several steps with my legs on the occasions when I find myself sat on stairs, which are now rare, having left university some time ago.
Perhaps a year after first attempting to copy Martin, I became aware that some friends of mine at school could make themselves burp at will. This I found impossible to accomplish, and it seemed to me to be the most fun-filled and praiseworthy talent that I might set myself to the business of acquiring. Petitioning such friends and my mother for instructions as to how to achieve the envied feat was a lengthy and frustrating process, as I soon found my desire to learn pitched against the problems of private language as these people tried to explain the sequence of very specific muscular contractions necessary to first correctly trap and then expel air using the throat. The initial stumbling block was the instruction to ‘swallow air’, which to my ears amounted to taking a breath in and gulping, which was not the same thing at all. I remember walking in the local park with my mother and our dogs, attempting to understand what she meant by holding air in the throat, begging for more clarity, until she bade me stop trying for fear that I would make myself ill with my disturbing and strident efforts.
I have of late found myself experiencing a similar annoyance: at the age of thirty-nine, I am still racked with jealousy when I hear a particular friend affect a very convincing child’s voice. This is not merely a question of talking in a silly falsetto: it is a perfectly convincing replication of a child of about three years old. Over the telephone it is quite unnerving. I enjoy impersonation and have put many hours into honing a small number of recognisable voices that I occasionally might use to lift an anecdote, but seem unable to create this very specific sound that he can adopt so effortlessly. This frustration is exacerbated by his attempts to express what he is doing, which of course relies primarily upon the inexpressible machinations of muscle-memory and the unconscious. I listen to what he says and attempt to emulate the voice, but the concentrated effort is thwarted by the laughter my high-pitched squealing provokes in us both. The ludicrous facial expressions that accompany my efforts provoke further giggles and force me continually to stop and start, which in turn means I tend to repeat the same syllable or phrase and quickly sound even more ridiculous, and thus the laughter is augmented and my sincere desire to acquire a skill descends into convulsion and open weeping from us both at my endeavours.
Long after I learnt a one-handed shuffle, I found that my most burning adult determination was to learn how to poach eggs perfectly. In the same way that my rage at not being able to find my pen before leaving the house far outweighs the anger I feel towards social injustices more worthy of my fury, the obsessive ambition I have felt around learning to burp or correctly poach eggs far outweighs any drive I have ever had regarding my career.
I had discovered good poached eggs after ordering breakfast in a hotel* the morning after a terrible gig. The joy of sitting alone on a sunny morning in a half-decent hotel† with a book and an indecent smorgasbord of buffet treats outweighs the pain of any difficulties encountered in the performance the night before, and clears the mind after a sleepless night of mentally replaying every excruciating moment and endlessly berating oneself in a hot, airless fluster under restrictive bed linen.‡ I have a real fondness for Eggs Benedict and tend to order this whenever I see it on a menu. Many hotels make the classic error of smothering the plate and all upon it with a lake of thick shop-bought Hollandaise; few realise that the key to the success of this glorious antemeridian concoction lies primarily in the interplay between perfectly poached fresh eggs, a strong-flavoured cured ham and the texture of the bread base. My own preference is for a smoked Black Forest ham on one half of an unbuttered sliced white muffin, or even an Irish potato farl, with two eggs piled on top and only a generous teaspoonful of the home-made sauce between them. The ham should send a sharp savoury sting through the dairy-mildness of the eggs and tangy, buttery slop of the Hollandaise; the bread should give substance and allow for yolk-and-sauce mopping, but any more than a half-muffin or the equivalent thereof makes for too heavy a meal for the morning. The Lanesborough in London did a superlative Benedict several years ago but now offer a bland blend involving uninteresting ham and the predictable thick sauce that seems very far from the obviously home-made emulsion they once served. The finest Eggs Benedict I have ever been served were made by a very gifted chef called Dan Savage who at the time of writing still runs the kitchen of St Giles’ Hotel in Norwich.
After having experimented much with poaching techniques and any number of specialised pans, moulds, spoons and other aids, I would offer the following advice to a would-be poacher. Firstly, the eggs must be fresh. If you are lucky enough to have the contacts, secure your eggs from the source. I had a brief period of farm-fresh eggs being supplied weekly by a chicken-breeding crew-member of a theatre where I once performed, and to switch to poaching eggs that are at most a day old is to discover the kind of joyful, effortless ease that one experiences when exchanging shoes for slippers after a long day, or when switching from a PC to a Mac. Fresh eggs are far user-friendlier.
Secondly, use a wide, shallow pan, and start boiling six or so centimetres of water in it. While it heats, crack your first egg into a tea-cup. When the water is boiling, turn the heat down so that columns of tiny bubbles rise to the surface and keep the water gently moving. If you are only poaching a single egg, swirl the water with a wooden spoon to create a whirlpool; lower the cup into the centre of the water and tip the egg slowly into the eye of the vortex. Sometimes a second egg can be added this way, but if several are being poached, forgo the whirling and add plenty of white distil
led vinegar (not malt!) to the water instead. Then carefully pour in each egg from the cup, and if those eggs are fresh, the vinegar will stop the whites from billowing out into the water like Constable’s clouds.
Once that hurdle has been overcome, the difficult part is over. Now cover the pan and leave for exactly three minutes. Prepare kitchen towel for drying, then when your timer beeps, trings or trumps, bring the eggs out with a slotted spoon in the order in which they were added and let them sit upon the towel for a moment before piling them on your toasted muffin.
‘Would you catch me if I did that again?’ I asked Joel and Charlotte, and looked across at the box. Under it were three face-down cards, just placed there under cover of misdirection.
Their attention now directed, the two saw what they presumed to be a reappearance of the three cards. Ahead of themselves, they roared with disbelief. Their conviction that these must be the actual chosen cards (which in reality were still palmed at the time in my right hand) earned me enough of a slip in their attention to (after lifting the box with my left hand) place the three palmed cards from my right on top of the three now exposed on the table. In the action of scooping up the cards, I let the three indifferent cards neatly and invisibly drop to my lap as I displayed the faces of the correct three, retained in the hand. Again, an impossible flight was confirmed.
The surprise of the double appearance of the cards under the box triggered a large enough reaction, and therefore a fulsome Newtonian off-beat for the final bold stratagem that would finish the trick. The three cards were still in my hands; Joel and Charlotte had turned to each other to excitedly share their feelings of befuddlement. I sat back, again to cue a sense that I was doing nothing of interest, and once more switched the three cards in my hand for an indifferent three from the top of the deck. I placed these, face-down of course, on the table. Meanwhile I dropped my hand with the remainder of the deck under the table to my lap and collected the three cards I had discarded there moments before, bringing them just up to below the level of the table. Taking the box in my other hand, I brought it and the deck together momentarily and slipped the top three, chosen cards into the case. It was a perfectly visible move for anyone who may have been watching, but I performed it as confidently, casually and efficiently as I had a thousand times before, knowing as I placed the box back in its position on the table that my participants, distracted by their own enthusiasm, had missed the load.
As I put down the box, Joel had turned back to me and was offering a kind, unabashed verdict on my skills, as he perceived them. Charlotte had her hand over her mouth and was looking at me in shocked silence. A wave of warmth for the two of them passed over me: I thought I would like to know them in private life. But for now I could not break the spell, as there was one more climax to come.
I raised my hand to stop Joel in his tracks. ‘Wait! Now you know what to look for. Back under the box. Watch . . .’
I picked up the three face-down cards, slipped them into the deck together and gave it a couple of cuts. Joel and Charlotte were moving their eyes between the deck and the box, waiting to catch the moment of arrival of the cards. I enjoyed their determination to catch me out. A flick of my little finger sent a random card flying from the middle of the deck, which then skimmed across the table towards them, with enough force for it to fall to the floor on their side.
‘Would you mind?’ I said, gesturing for them to retrieve it, as if the expulsion of the pasteboard had been an accident.
Neither of them moved, knowing I was forcing at least one of them to look away. ‘You watch the cards, I’ll watch the box,’ was Joel’s solution to Charlotte, and he lowered himself slowly sideways, eyes locked on the box, while he felt around blindly on the floor for the card. He came back up with it, still looking at the box, and extended his hand towards me with the card without moving his gaze. I reached across to take it and purposefully blocked Charlotte’s view of the box for an instant, causing her to sit up straight to peer over the top of my arm.
I wanted them later to ascribe the moment of method to this charade of misdirection. Therefore, I now needed to move straight to the finale, as if I had just invisibly loaded the box at that moment. I took the recovered card from Joel and slid it back in the deck, then clicked my fingers over it. ‘Gone!’ I exclaimed, and spread the cards in a wide arc once again to show that the indices of the three chosen cards were absent. Joel’s eyes were still locked on the card-case, though he clearly wanted to look at the card spread. I sat right back, far from both cards and box, and lifted my hands in a gesture of open honesty, which cued Joel to relax his scrutiny of the box and check the spread instead. He and Charlotte saw that the cards were not there, and that they were clearly also not under the box. I waited for them to look up.
‘Are they not under the box?’ I asked, and looked back and forth between Charlotte and the box, prompting her to pick it up and see.
She hesitated, then followed the silent command, leaning over to lift the red and white carton. Nothing there. She put it back down and looked at me, uncertain where this was heading.
‘Pick it up again,’ I said.
She did.
I gestured for her to shake it.
She shook the case, and as she did so, the rattling sound of the three cards inside announced at long last the denouement of the trick to the three of us.
Charlotte flung herself back into the seat and turned to face Joel, holding the box close to her face, her eyes wide. She started to open the flap and he came in close in order to be able to peer down inside, their faces almost touching as she, a little nervously, opened the box and he reached up to help. They both saw the top edges of three cards inside, and now both were holding the cheap box as if it were something precious, and pulling the cards out together. The cards were facing Joel as they were removed, so he saw each first before it was turned towards Charlotte. They brought them out slowly, almost tenderly.
I gathered together the cards from the table and held out my hand to take back the props. They both still held cards; Joel had in his hands his Jack of Hearts along with the Bicycle box. He and Charlotte turned to face me and speak. She started to, but her gaze was quickly pulled up to a place behind me, and Joel’s followed to the same place a half-second later.
A moving presence at my left side . . . Benedict was pushing past, a glass of red wine in each hand. Joel and Charlotte separated quickly and guiltily. A fat arm swung across and dumped one glass on the table in front of her; the other was retained by Benedict, who remained too close, peripherally huge, his colossal white shirt and flapping suit jacket right by my left side, the sweet smell of fresh cigarette smoke caught in their fibres, and his face, when I turned to look, a little flushed from having recently come back into the restaurant from the cool evening air.
I rose to let Benedict in, but he remained stock-still, forcing me to lean back a little as I stood. I saw his wallet was in his right trouser pocket, nearest me. If he sat down, his right hip and my left knee could brush. I thought of the powerful nickel-cadmium-coated rare-earth magnet strapped to my leg.
‘Thank you so much,’ Charlotte said, handing me the cards, tilting her head to look up, her hair following buoyantly.
Joel stood to shake my hand. I shifted my chair to gain comfortable distance from Benedict, keeping him within reach of my knee, and took Joel’s hand. ‘Hey, amazing,’ he offered, shaking his head to express his happy bewilderment. He did not look at Benedict.
I smiled at the two, placed the deck of cards into the box, and clapped my hands together, quickly throwing the box high into my jacket where I caught it under my left arm. I opened my hands to show the box vanished and bowed a little towards Joel and Charlotte.
I turned and bowed in the same way to Benedict, taking the opportunity to release my grip on the cards and let them drop into my hand at the base of the jacket on that side. A tiny movement slipped them into my trouser pocket.
I left the trio; Benedict was saying somet
hing and laughing loudly and alone behind me. At the table to my side, from which I had taken a chair before the trick, the family were now watching with delight. The boy was absorbed in my movements.
‘Here he is!’ the tall woman said over-eagerly to her son.
I smiled and stepped across, bringing the borrowed chair with me and retrieving the deck in order to repeat the performance. I turned my body to ensure that the three behind me could not see me take the cards from my pocket, so as to preserve the effect of the disappearance.
The woman continued to speak with a feigned excitement entirely for the benefit of her quiet son. Wide-eyed and possessed of a large, grinning mouth that showed her ample teeth, she assured the boy that I would be able to show him something ‘wonderfully amazing!’ Her thin husband, in a brown corduroy jacket and green jumper, lifted his eyes to me from behind his glasses and faintly smiled before dropping his gaze to the large brandy before him.
As she instructed me loudly to sit, I gazed through her, and my eyes caught a movement at the far end of the lounge: the grey mass of the fat man finding his way back to his table from the toilets, through the warm light, navigating other tables as he went, hitching at the sides of his trousers. The muted roar of the sibilant cistern followed him until it was again cut short as the door to the toilets swung shut.
